Howard Temin

(1934 - 1994)

Howard Temin was a Jewish American geneticist who was awarded the 1975 Nobel Prize in Medicine.

Temin (born December 10, 1934; died February 9, 1994) was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvannia.
He received his bachelor's degree in Biology from Swarthmore
College in 1955 and his doctorate from the California
Institute of Technology in 1959. In 1960, Temin became
an Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison,
in the McArdle Laboratory for Cancer Research. Over
the years, he has held various position at the university
including Associate Professor, Full Professor, Wisconsin
Alumni Research Foundation Professor of Cancer Research,
and American Cancer Society Professor of Viral Oncology
and Cell Biology (1974).

He discovered reverse transcriptase in the 1970's
at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He won a Nobel
Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1975, along with David Baltimore and Renato Dulbecco, for describing how tumor viruses
act on the genetical material of the cell through reverse
transcriptase. This upset the widely held belief at
the time of the "Central Dogma" of molecular
biology posited by Nobel laureate Francis Crick, one
of the co-discoverers of the structure of DNA (along
with James Watson and Rosalind Franklin). Crick, along
with most other molecular biologists of the day, believed
genetic information to flow exclusively from DNA to
RNA to protein. Temin showed that certain tumor viruses
carried the enzymatic ability to reverse the flow of
information from RNA back to DNA using reverse transcriptase.
The discovery of reverse transcriptase is one of the
most important of the modern era of medicine, as reverse
transcriptase is the central enzyme in several widespread
human diseases, such as HIV, the virus that causes AIDS,
and Hepatitis B. Reverse transcriptase is also an important
component of several important techniques in molecular
biology and diagnostic medicine, such as the polymerase
chain reaction (PCR).

A long-time advocate against smoking, Temin died at
the age of 59, on February 9, 1994, from lung cancer,
although he himself was never a smoker.

The following press release from the Royal Swedish
Academy of Sciences describes Temin's work:

The fact that
the viruses can cause tumours was shown
already more than 60 years ago by Rous
in studies of sarcomas and leukemias in
chickens. However this observation was
for a long time regarded as a biological
curiosity and not until during the 1950ies
was it shown that under certain conditions
viruses could cause leukemias and other
tumours also in other animals, e.g. mice.
Studies of virus-induced changes of the
growth characteristics of a normal cell
to that of tumour cells - a phenomenon
referred to as transformation - was facilitated
during this decade due to the availability
of methods for cultivating cells under
laboratory conditions. This technique combined
with the discovery of several viruses which
could cause transformation in animals and
in cell cultures provided facilities for
studies of the role of the virus in this
process. It was found that both viruses
which contain genetic material of the same
type as that present in chromosomes of
cells i.e. deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA)
and also viruses containing a different
type of genetic material, ribonucleic acid
(RNA) could cause transformation.